60GB iPod Coming?

An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba today announced that it will offer a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch hard drive in the coming months and that Apple has already placed its order. Cindy Lee, deputy manager of Toshiba's hard disk drive division, said the drive will enter mass production during July or August. All three iPod models (15GB, 20GB, and 40GB) use Toshiba drives, while the iPod mini uses a 4GB 1-inch drive from Hitachi. Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000 of the 1.8-inch drives per month to Apple."

Comments

July or August, eh?

[Snowspinner]

Seems perfectly timed to coincide with MacWorld. So that's two announcements we know about now - Tiger and the 60 GB iPod. Wonder what the surprise will be. 3.0 G5s? G5 notebooks? iPonies?

60GB... but anything else?

[srcosmo]

Will this new iPod have any other features? I picked up an iRiver iHP 120 last month for a good $50 (Canadian) less than the similar-capacity iPod, and the iRiver has optical in/out, direct encoding to MP3 or WAV, OGG Vorbis support, USB 2.0, and an FM tuner.

Does Apple have any plans to beef up their offerings, or are they counting on consumers to keep paying for the iPod's hipster image?

Re:60GB... but anything else?

[harlows_monkeys]

The problem with the iRiver iHP 1x0 players is that they lack DRM. I'm currently leaning toward an iPod because of this. Most of my use will be for music I rip from CD, but I would like the option of buying the occasional single track from one of the online stores, when I don't like enough on an album to justify buying a CD.

Also, the iPod works with Audible.com. The iRiver does not.

They get a better deal than we do...

[LostCluster]

The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.

But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.

Re:They get a better deal than we do...

[evilviper]

their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside...

Well, actually it looks like it was just a matter of Creative Labs eating the extra cost of the CF drives to get the units out the door on-time.

Almost immediately, the CF card disappeared, and it was replaced with an identical-looking hard drive with only an IDE interface (not really a CF card).

If you've got an example of any other MP3 players selling for less than the cost of the drive alone, I'll eat my words...

Re:Enough is Enough

[jfengel]

So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.

Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.

Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.

Re:Enough is Enough

[niko9]

Do you listen to 3:05 minute pop songs? I don't. I have a alllot of classical music I would love to take with me. They take up alot of space.

Drives?

[TheOtherKiwi]

Anyone notice that "Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000" but Apple are stepping up production from 800,000 to 1,000,000 per month...where are all the other drives sourced from?

Pricing

[maelstrom]

So is Apple ever going to drop the pricing on the other models when they come out with more "advanced" ones?

Portable HD durability?

[achurch]

Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.

Re:Too much space!

[midifarm]

Not everyone uses iPods strictly for music. I remeber reading several articles about how the guys filming the LOTR trilogy used iPods to transport video footage shot in the field to their editing stations offsite. They work just like a HD, at least on OSX. So having 60GB of storage especially for video or possibly high-end digital cameras or even audio would be very useful, especially since it can be a multi-use device.

Peace

Re:Woohoo!

[tm2b]

Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car.

Well, with all due respect you don't have a very pricy car then - you'll probably spend more on gas this year. It takes about 900 GB, which costs about $1000, or about $.66 per CD. Worth it, I think, for being able to be totally random access in bulk.

I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving.

Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.

It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.

Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.

Lossless is a waste of space on iPods

[CaptainCheese]

your plan has merits, but one colossal drawback.

The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.

Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.

The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...

Re:Woohoo!

[tm2b]

With that amount of music why don't you just put a computer in your plane? Won't have to worry about harddrive space then.

Funny you should ask...

That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.

On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.

Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.

On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.